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CONFUSED, YOU WILL BE: 'BEFORE' AND 'AFTER'
David Beaver and Cleo Condoravdi Sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center/Mellon Foundation Graduate Research Program "Confused? You will be after..." as the famous tagline went. But suppose that before there is any confusion, you hear our talk. It then follows that there is no confusion before you hear it. Indeed on this premise you might avoid confusion altogether. But suppose instead that after there is some confusion, you hear the talk. Unfortunately there may still be confusion after you hear it. Furthermore, in this case confusion at some point is unavoidable. "Before" and "after" seem to lead to quite different inferences. And long after there is *any* really serious confusion about these puzzling inference patterns, you might ask yourself why the Negative Polarity Item "any" is licensed in this sentence. Up to now there has only been one account of why words like "any" are sometimes licensed in "after" clauses, and sometimes not, an account due to Linebarger. She tried to explain the licensing in terms of what she called a "negative implicature", but her account makes incorrect predictions. Yet another puzzle: in David's native tongue, English, it is natural to say "after there was confusion", but in Cleo's native Greek the equivalent would be (in approximate transliteration) "after there was not confusion." Who's confused, David or Cleo? We already dealt with some of this confusion in an earlier paper (Beaver and Condoravdi 2003). In this talk we'll look at some of the remaining puzzles, specifically Negative Polarity Item licensing by "after" and the differences between the interpretation of temporal prepositions in English and in Greek. We will suggest that both should be explained in terms of the selection of time points or time intervals available to temporal prepositions like "before" and "after." 
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